I admit it. This blog is NOT consistent. What it is keeps changing.
Right now, it's pretty much a place where I keep photos, videos, and links to websites that interest me.
Before that, I wrote a few blogs myself and still do once in a blue moon. But most of the stuff before the links are just reprints of articles I found interesting.
Email me at OlderMusicGeek(at)yahoo(dot)com.

The outlaw Jesse James came to grief when he and his gang tried to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota in 1876. Unfortunately for Jesse, he had forgotten that he was no longer in his usual hunting grounds of eastern Kansas and western Missouri... and the locals not only did not include any sympathizers of his, but had their life savings in the bank he was targeting and no sense of humor about losing those savings. Oops... Save for James himself and his brother Frank, the entire gang was killed or arrested during either the robbery or the ensuing manhunt, effectively ending his crime spree. He himself was killed by a member of his own gang six years later to collect the bounty on his head.

An example out of Ferdinand von Schirach's Verbrechen (a book of cases he precided over as a lawyer). Some skinheads decide that a wimpy looking man in a neat suit would be a nice diversion. They ended up dead. It was hinted later, that the guy in the suit was a contract killer on his way home. He had no papers on him, no mark that could identify him - he didn't speak a single word. They had to let him go because they had no evidence and the thing they had on him was clearly self-defense - there were several witnesses to clear him.

One such incident has become fondly-recalled lore in the Society For Creative Anachronism: After a Society event in New York City, a lady who uses the name "Sir Trude Lacklandia" was walking home late at night and assaulted by several muggers. When she refused to hand over her cash, one tried to stab her with a six-inch knife - only to have the blade turned by the chainmail she was wearing under her woolen cloak. She then drew her (very real) sword, said "I'll see your six, and raise you thirty-five!" before chasing the muggers off. A bard in the SCA afterwards wrote a humorous song about it, which has become quite popular.

A middle-aged, five-foot-seven Asian man was accosted by two armed, six-footer African-American muggers in late 2011. One mugger was admitted to a hospital with cracked vertebrae and the other had his arm broken in several places. The uninjured Asian man waited for police to arrive while eating takeaway yakisoba on the curb next to the muggers' unconscious bodies. The Asian man was later identified as a fourth-dan Aikidoka.

In 1999, a thief stole the wallet of who he thought was a tourist in Seville Airport and ran. That "tourist" was Maurice Greene, World Champion sprinter who set the world record for the hundred-meter dash. The thief didn't get very far.

In 1971, legendary boxer Jack Dempsey was taking a cab home with his wife, and was accosted by a mugger. Apparently, the mugger never knew what hit him. Dempsey was 78 at the time.

In 2010, a group of forty train robbers stormed a train in West Bengal and started taking valuables from the passengers. One of the robbers then decided to rape one of the women on the train. It turned out that one of the train's passengers was Bishnu Shrestha, a corporal in the 8th Gurkha Infantry. And Bishnu objected, sternly, resulting in him killing several of the robbers by himself with just his kukri and sending the rest fleeing for their lives.